


Growing Up (is a dangerous undertaking)

by AngeNoir



Category: Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013)
Genre: Child Soldiers, Codependency, Gen, Growing Up Together, Past Child Abuse, Protective Siblings, Protectiveness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 21:49:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5471909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AngeNoir/pseuds/AngeNoir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gretel cries herself to sleep while Hansel hisses and winces in pain from his illness. They're both doing this silently, because if there's one thing they've learned, it's that it's them against the world and they will guard each other's backs from anything that might come with it. Ever since they'd gotten free from that witch's house, they only care about one another. Who cares what the other villagers or kids think of them?</p><p>Yet they can't overlook it when kids start disappearing. Will they really be able to sit back when they know what happens inside a witch's lair?</p><p>But what can they do?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Growing Up (is a dangerous undertaking)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eli](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eli/gifts).



The first time Gretel realized she and Hansel would need outside help was six months after they escaped from the witch’s house. They had stumbled upon a village, and there they had been taken in by well-meaning but completely oblivious and unhelpful villagers who thought that she needed to wear more dresses and stop finding weapons to practice with, and who thought that Hansel needed to speak up more and rely on his sister less.

Part of the issues the village had with them was that Hansel had grown silent; Gretel became his voice, his protector, his rock. Hansel, in turn, was nearly feral, and nearly always short of breath, and she worried about him even as the villagers separated them to learn more “appropriate” behaviors. Hansel was apprenticed to the blacksmith, Gretel to the midwife, and they spent most of their days separate until evening, when they returned to the smith’s house and said their prayers like good, god-fearing folk, ate their dinner, and then went to bed.

All in all, Hansel was no example for what a young boy should be, and Gretel was _certainly_ no example for what a young girl should be, and no matter how fine _they_ were with this, the village continued to try to mold them into the paths their lives should have taken had their father not abandoned them in the middle of a forest and been captives of a witch for more than three months.

Hansel barely ate, and a lot of the weight he had gained underneath the witch’s torture was lost in those past six months, but he always complained of his chest hurting. He would whisper that he thought the witch had cursed him, left him with pain in his fingers and toes, headaches that threatened to split his head apart. He was learning how to design weapons in secret, looking at the designs the blacksmith had in between making nails and horseshoes, and he wondered once to her if he could make a vise to clamp his head together, force his brain to work. She worried about him, in between learning how to sew (useful), learning how to cook (less useful), and learning how to clean (completely unnecessary). When they went back to their room after their food, she counted his stuttering breaths in the dark, forced him to sleep on the bed and take all the covers no matter the cold, and prayed to gods she didn’t believe in anymore for his safety and health.

But it took six months before they were lugging water in a tub towards the house in the twilight and Hansel just – collapsed. As if a bolt of lightning had struck him, he fell to the ground and no matter how much she screamed and shook, he did not move.

The blacksmith and midwife both did not know what to do, and did not have the coin or goods to ask the healer to care for him. So Gretel pulled Hansel onto her back, hiked her skirts to her waist and tied them off, and trudged through the muddy spring night to the small cottage on the outskirts of town. It took her too long, and she cursed these simple-minded villagers, their well-seeming faces that hid a deep fear of the dark and the different, their stubborn inability to just _see_ the evil that was out in the wide world.

When she made it to the healer’s cottage, Hansel’s breathing was fast and shallow, and he was marginally conscious, so she took him off her back and leaned him against the wall, ignoring her own shaking body, and pounded on the wooden door with her tiny fists.

The door opened after no more than four or five sharp slams of her fists against the unforgiving wood, and the old crone looked down at her, face annoyed. “What do you want, child?” she snapped.

“My brother – he’s ill, he collapsed, please, he’s been feeling ill for so long,” she gasped out, her words shuddering out of her too-small frame.

The woman peered around the corner and frowned. “What do you want me to do? What coin have you?”

“None, Healer Elena,” Gretel gasped out, but when the door began to close she threw herself at it, blocked it as best as she could. “I will work for you!”

The grizzled face slowly reappeared as she opened the door. “What will you do?”

“I will work for you, for however long it takes to pay off our debt. I will gather herbs in the forest for you, I will mix what you need, I will aid you. _Please_ do not leave my brother to die. He is – he is all I have left.” Spots trailed across Gretel’s eyes, spots that left her blinking dizzily to try and dispel them.

After a long moment, Gretel’s heart thundering in her ears, the woman let out a grumbling sigh. “Very well. Bring him inside.” Then, after a short moment of consideration, “ _Can_ you bring him inside?”

Gretel could do anything for her brother, and proved it by levering him up again. It helped that he was aware, if not coordinated and so weak as to hang desperately against Gretel’s throat and shoulders. He attempted to put one foot before the other, she dragged him into the healer’s house, and the door closed behind them.

***

Because she was working for the healer instead of the midwife, no matter that the medical care was necessary, the midwife refused to allow Gretel into the house again. Superstition kept those that knew of herbs and remedies away from the general populace, kept those that healed in a shroud of mystery and possible demonic influences, and since Gretel threw her lot in with the healer, she was not allowed to be in the house with ‘decent folk.’ Hansel objected strenuously, but when he threatened to come with Gretel and leave the blacksmith, she put a hand on his arm and pulled him aside.

“Think, Hansel. You learn all you can, from him and her if need be, and I will learn all I can from the healer. Together we’ll learn, and when you know enough to be a master in your own right, we can leave this village and find one where we’re unknown, and we’ll be fine. Learn your craft, first. You love smithing. Don’t give it up for me.”

It was their first real fight, and Hansel – who already didn’t talk to anyone much – stopped talking to her for a week. It hurt, but she was a planner, and Hansel was a follower. He obeyed her because he trusted that she would not steer him wrong.

(She hoped she hadn’t.)

And underneath the tutelage of the healer, Gretel learned that the witch had forced so much sweets into Hansel that an organ inside of him had been overwhelmed and stopped working. ( _“I have never seen such a severe case. Just eating sweets should not have caused this,”_ the healer had grumbled. _“It is most unusual.”_ )

So now, every day, once a day, Hansel needed medicine injected into his flesh to provide his system with the necessary humors that his organ had stopped creating inside of him to process the food he ate. The medicine was expensive, dangerous in large quantities, difficult to create, and could not be stored for a long period of time. Every two weeks, Gretel would buy or barter for a goat and bring it back to the healer, would watch the process with intent eyes as the healer would kill the goat and remove the oddly shaped organ and proceed to cut it up into small pieces, mix it with herbs and alcohol and let it sit to dissolve, before loading it in needles. The injection itself kept Hansel from feeling thirsty, from feeling faint. It kept him from feeling pain in his chest or numbness in his extremities. It also created a mild fever that made Hansel hot to the touch, but the healer told them that it wasn’t to be helped. “We have not the coin to get something purer, and it will last as long as these extracts, which means it will be an expensive trip every two weeks – and you are already far in debt to me, girl,” Healer Elena said gruffly, though not unkindly. “He can handle the fever. He handled the pain of his illness for six months.”

“What would be purer?” Gretel asked, carefully lying the herbs she gathered out to dry.

The woman paused, considering. “Beef,” she said slowly. “Perhaps horse, even. Bigger animals create more of the humor, and so the solution is of a higher concentration than when taken from a goat, or sheep. Or pig. But we have not the money to buy a bull or even an old cow every two weeks. Already I am stretched tight buying this much meat so often.”

Which was how Gretel came to learn that a large amount of income would be necessary for her and Hansel to live comfortably, and that her brother would always be in low-level pain.

***

She cried herself to sleep that night, after telling Hansel the fever couldn’t be helped and her little brother simply shrugged philosophically. He had been accepting of conditions she deemed intolerable, and she decided they were going to find a way to remove all pain from him. No one should have to worry about missing a dose and growing dizzy, and the fact that the fever sometimes induced hallucinations and always created a general discomfort that had Hansel wearing short-sleeved tunics even in the winter as he shivered his way to sleep.

Those were the last tears she cried about something she couldn’t change. Instead, she redoubled her efforts to imprint everything she learned permanently into her memory, and used her new skill with woodcraft to bring Hansel small treats in the form of mushrooms and tubers that he could withstand. He couldn’t take sweet items anymore – even sugar in his tea was too much. The blacksmith and his wife weren’t great at caring for Hansel, but they weren’t bad, either, and Hansel, for all that he winces constantly and can’t do everything as well as a healthy apprentice, enjoys the work. He genuinely loves crafting with metal, and Gretel lets him prattle about his craft and his techniques as she prepares the injection and slides the needle into the flesh of his thigh.

“A timer,” she says one day. “Do you think you can make one?”

He pauses, caught by surprise in the middle of his chatter, and tilts his head. “A timer?”

“I think you should get two injections. It might make it easier you for you to man the bellows, to do the heavy work that pains you. You’re always shaking by supper.”

Hansel thought it over a minute. “I can ask the clockmaker. He comes around sometimes; I’ve gotten pretty good at making gears. I can do small things.”

“I know,” she said, rubbing his back and stealing some of his mushroom stew. “And you do fine work, but I know that you have plans for weapons, bigger things. Axes, and guns. Swords. You cannot be happy your life making bullets and fine filigree work, no matter how much you do it well.”

Hansel drummed his fingers against his thigh, unconsciously moving his fingers over the track marks on his thigh. “A timer.”

“The medicine is poisonous if taken too often, or too much of it is taken,” she said quietly. “Once a day is safe; twice, carefully spaced out, should not be too bad. There’s enough from each goat to make two injections per day and still last us the week.”

It was a temporary solution, but one that made it easier for Hansel to do heavier work. He began to lift weights – bags of flour, metal chunks, wood logs – trying to improve his upper arm strength to combat the fatigue. Gretel ignored the taunts from the children in the village (Hansel never heard them, primarily because Hansel didn’t willingly interact with anyone other than Gretel) and did her best to care for the ailing healer.

Their lives weren’t perfect, but they were surviving. It wasn’t ideal, it wasn’t what she had thought as a child, sitting and listening to her mother’s lullabies, but they could live like this. They could make the best of it.

Then the first child went missing.

***

It took her a while to notice the pattern. The baker’s son’s disappearance is what finally alerted her to what was happening, because he was the most persistent of her tormentors and the lack of his filth was what told her something was wrong. She brought it up to Hansel at their shared dinner outside the healer’s hut.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Whole village’s been talking about it. He’s the fifth one missing.”

She stared at the leg of goat that she had cooked for them to share. “Do they know what the problem is?” she asked.

He looked at her in surprise. “Gretel, we know what the problem is!”

“And what would you have us do about it?” she demanded.

Immediately he hunched his shoulders and looked down at the plate. She felt bad for snapping at him, but she was terrified. What were they, youths barely into adulthood, supposed to do that grown men could not?

“The – they’re probably already eaten anyway. Aren’t they,” Hansel whispered quietly.

She stood up abruptly. “I’m tired. I’m going to bed. You should get some sleep too.”

***

She couldn’t sleep.

***

The next evening, when they shared their supper again, Hansel trying to appease her by bringing her a beautifully fashioned pendant he had crafted for her, she looked him straight in the eye, trying not to show how terrified she was. “If we do this,” she said severely, “you will end up inside a witch’s home again. We might die. We might find them eaten. We’ll have to kill again.”

He shivered a little, but she could see the steel in his gaze, the determination to do or die. “Okay. Only if you’re okay with it. But could you really leave them to face what we had to face, Gretel?”

Taking in a deep breath, she tried to control the sharp terror that gibbered in the back of her mind, telling her she was making a huge mistake. “Okay then.”

***

Villages told tales of the teenagers who hunted witches for a living, grumbled at the fact that the sister and brother team set their prices high, shared a hotel room, and had unconventional weapons. Some said that they were the children of the devil, a worse evil than the witches themselves, sent to rob good citizens out of their hard-earned money.

Hansel and Gretel didn’t care for rumors. They didn’t even hear them.

Now, as it was then, it was them against the world and that was all there was to it.


End file.
